In 2023, Jurickson Profar was quite possibly the worst full-time player in Major League Baseball. In 2024, he was one of the best. Slashing .280/.380/.459 while playing half his games at the pitcher-friendly Petco Park, Profar finished with a 139 wRC+, sixth best among qualified NL batters. Despite his mediocre baserunning (-0.8 BsR) and poor defense (-8 DRS, -6 FRV), his bat carried him to a 4.3-WAR season. Still, he entered free agency in a tricky position. He’d be looking for a suitor who’d put much more stock in his recent phenomenal performance than the long, uneven period that came before it. On Thursday, the Braves emerged as one such team. Deciding that Profar’s pros far outweighed his cons, Atlanta inked the veteran outfielder to a three-year, $42 million contract.

In hindsight, this contract and pairing feel so predictable that I could have pre-written this article weeks ago. When it comes to projecting Profar’s future performance, the error bars are wide. We’re talking about a player who was released by, of all teams, the Colorado Rockies in 2023 and found himself starting for the NL All-Stars less than a year later. Yet, projecting his contract turned out to be surprisingly easy. Ben Clemens predicted Profar would sign for three years and $45 million. MLB Trade Rumors predicted Profar would sign for three years and $45 million. Kiley McDaniel of ESPN predicted Profar would sign for three years and $45 million. The median projection from our contract crowdsourcing exercise? Yep, three years and $45 million. As divided as this country might be, we could all agree on one thing: Profar would sign a three-year deal with an AAV close to $15 million. Lo and behold, the Braves will pay him $14 million per annum through 2027.

Three years and $42 million is the same contract both Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and Jorge Soler signed last offseason, and very close to the three-year, $43.5 million deal Mitch Haniger signed the winter before. In other words, it’s the going rate for a corner outfielder in his early 30s with something like a two-win projection but All-Star upside. Profar might have a wider range of outcomes, but his median projection is right in that window. If he reverts to the version of himself that we saw in 2023, the Braves will soon regret his contract. If he keeps up his 2024 performance, his salary will look like a bargain. Ultimately, however, Profar only has to be the player he was in 2018 (107 wRC+, 2.2 WAR), 2020 (113 wRC+, 0.9 WAR), or 2022 (110 wRC+, 2.4 WAR) for this deal to pay dividends. That’s exactly the kind of player Steamer thinks he’ll be in 2025:

Profar’s fit in Atlanta makes just as much sense as the terms of his deal. For one thing, he says the Braves were always one of his top choices in free agency. Pandering as that comment may seem at first, it makes sense why a Curaçao native would seek out an opportunity with the Braves, and Profar confirmed as much in a Zoom call with reporters on Friday. “Curaçao is a Braves country,” he explained. “Everywhere you go, everyone is a Braves fan.”

Thanks largely to Andruw Jones, many Curaçaon players grew up rooting for Atlanta, including Ozzie Albies and former Braves Andrelton Simmons and Jair Jurrjens. Of the 17 current and former MLB players born in Curaçao, six have played for the Braves, more than twice as many as any other team. Those six players – Jones, Simmons, Albies, Jurrjens, Kenley Jansen, and Randall Simon – have combined for 104.3 WAR with the club. That’s more than 60% of all WAR produced by all Curaçaon MLB players since Hensley Meulens became the first in 1989. Profar and Albies will work to increase that total in 2025.

As for the team’s perspective, Alex Anthopoulos said earlier this winter the Braves would likely increase their payroll. Yet, prior to signing Profar, Anthopoulos had actually saved more than he’d spent for 2025. He traded Soler, reworked the contracts of both Reynaldo López and Aaron Bummer, and had yet to sign any free agents to guaranteed major league deals. As a result, Atlanta’s estimated payroll was more than $30 million below last year’s final figure. So, the Braves had money to spend, and bolstering the lineup was the obvious way to spend it. They needed offense after scoring just 4.35 runs per game in 2024 and finishing with a team-wide 100 wRC+.

Addressing the media on Thursday, Anthopoulos said the Braves had always considered Profar “the second-best free-agent bat,” behind only Juan Soto. Those comments feel like far more of the pandering sort than what Profar said about growing up a Braves fan — because at least Profar’s pass the smell test. Yet, even if Profar wasn’t the second-best bat on the market, he was the best hitter still available who made sense from a positional standpoint. Suffice it to say, neither Alex Bregman nor Pete Alonso was a fit; the Braves are fully stocked at third base, first base, and DH.

The corner outfield, however, was a clear area for improvement. After trading Soler to the Angels, and with Ronald Acuña Jr.’s timeline to return from ACL surgery still unclear, the Braves were set to enter 2025 with both Bryan De La Cruz and Jarred Kelenic occupying spots in the starting lineup. As Michael Baumann laid out last month, neither of those players has earned an everyday job on a contending club. Obviously, Profar is a massive upgrade. He should also be an upgrade over Soler, the player he’s effectively replacing from last year’s lineup. One could make a case that Soler is the better offensive player; his bat is more reliable, even if his ceiling isn’t quite as high. However, Soler is such a liability in the outfield that he makes Profar look like Steven Kwan. Thus, it’s hard to find fault in Anthopoulos’s decision to offload Soler and reinvest that money in Profar. If all goes according to plan, the Braves could eventually have three All-Star-caliber players – Profar, Acuña, and Michael Harris II – roaming the outfield grass.

The $42 million question, of course, is if Profar will ever play at an All-Star level again. His upside is undeniable. When faced with two sets of data, one of which is much, much larger than the other, we’ve all been taught to place more emphasis on the bigger sample, even if the smaller sample is more recent (and exciting). In Profar’s case, that means we can’t ignore his 92 wRC+ over the first 3,623 plate appearances of his career. His incredible 2024 performance brings that wRC+ number up only to 99. Over 11 big league seasons, he has been below average at the plate more often than not:

At the same time, Profar accomplished something very real in 2024, and with it, his ceiling rose to the sky. Do you think big leaguers can fluke their way to one great season like that? To quote Brent Rooker, “No they can’t.” The vast majority of players could not produce a 139 wRC+ over a full season even as their 95th-percentile outcome. Even fewer could back that up with equally impressive underlying metrics. Indeed, the 2024 version of Profar combined his keen eye at the plate (11.4% walk rate, 90th-percentile chase rate) and excellent bat-to-ball skills (90th-percentile whiff rate) with newfound strength. His 44.4% hard-hit rate ranked in the 71st percentile. Never before had he ranked above the bottom 25% of the league:

Even better, this new version of Profar was consistently productive. He had only one month, August, in which his wRC+ was below 130, and even then, it was still a respectable 102. Meanwhile, his xwOBA in August, also a season low, was still a healthy .337. If that were his full-season number, it would have ranked in the 74th percentile. Sticking with the theme of consistency, Profar hit almost as well from both sides of the plate, posting a 137 wRC+ as a lefty facing righties and a 147 wRC+ as a righty facing lefties. What’s more, he outperformed the league-average wOBA and xwOBA against all three pitch types: fastballs, breaking balls, and offspeed pitches:

In addition to his consistency, I was encouraged by the fact that Profar’s pull rate on each type of batted ball was lower in 2024 than it was the year before. His overall pull rate dropped from 44.7% in 2023 to 40.4% in ’24. There isn’t anything wrong with pulling the baseball, but it was all the more impressive to see him make such hard contact without a sudden increase in pull rate. Simply put, hitting the ball that hard that consistently without sacrificing contact or discipline for pull rate isn’t something a hitter just does by accident. Sure, outlier seasons happen. We’ve all seen hitters’ exit velocities spike one season only to drop back down the next. Yet, as far as massive, unexpected quality-of-contact improvements go, this one is about as believable as they come.

All in all, Profar’s efforts led to an improvement of 5.9 WAR from 2023 to ’24. Over the past decade, only nine players have increased their WAR by so much from one year to the next. None of those players was coming off an undisrupted, healthy season the year prior, and only two were already in their 30s: Joey Votto in 2015 and Aaron Judge in 2024. In other words, what Profar accomplished is almost unprecedented in recent memory. Some might use that as evidence to write it off as a fluke. After all, no one ever does this. Then again, others might see it as evidence that this isn’t the kind of season anyone can just luck into. After all, no one ever does this.

The Braves are in the latter camp. Anthopoulos expressed as much, telling reporters, “We believe who [Profar] was last year is who he is going forward.” Maybe that’s true, but the executive’s confidence seems to be at least a bit of an exaggeration. Then again, what else was he supposed to say? Either way, Anthopolous didn’t exactly have to put his money where his mouth was to get a deal done. The Braves will hope Profar continues to be a star, but as long as he’s a league-average corner outfielder, his $14 million annual salary is a perfectly reasonable price to pay.